On the subject of love… a six year journey to now making wedding videos

Here I am, again, working late into the night on the same thing I have been working on for the last six years when I should probably be sleeping.

Weddings have been a huge part of my life for over six years. Telling wedding stories has had such a huge impact on me personally, as a person and as a storyteller. The funny thing is, the fact that it’s a wedding has had nothing to do with it at all.

Sure we make wedding videos but the fact that they are weddings never really meant that much to us. We are telling stories about people who just happen to be getting married that day. When I think back on every single wedding we have ever filmed, what do I remember? It’s a good question, the answer is really quite simple.

It has always been and will always be about the people.

People are what we are interested in and it is those special connections between friends, family, and lovers that shape the stories we tell. We often get asked, why do you keep coming back for more? What drives you to continue to tell wedding stories? To us, a wedding is a great opportunity to tell a story about people going through all sorts of emotions. There are few opportunities like being at a wedding were you get so much story right there in front of you and the best part is, it’ s all real, honest and pure. That sounds like a great way to spend a Saturday to me!

In the movies a Director is always trying to recreate reality to tell their story, there is a craft there and it’s truly a special accomplishment. However what we do with wedding videos is really no different. Right from the early years we realized the kind of stories we wanted to make. We wanted our films to feel like exactly that, films. We wanted interesting characters, conflicts, hero’s, villains a climax maybe throw in an Indian princess and an evil mother in law, just kidding, but again I think you get my point. While at the same time we understood that we wanted to create the most realistic and honest film possible, just like a hollywood movie director. Now, a movie Director has actors, at a wedding we don’t have that, they are just, well, them, and that’s awesome! What an advantage that gives us. Think about it,

we don’t have to re-create reality, it’s happening right in front of us, our job is to figure how to “capture the moment”.

I apologize for that last line, I couldn’t help myself.

Over the years we have worked our butts off in pre-production. Learning who our characters are before we even pulled out our cameras. Things like how they related to one another, what their stories are, how will they react to different moments. By planning ahead we were able to shoot these people as they were and we did not need to make them into something else. This allowed for the most natural stories possible and it made each wedding video totally unique and different from the last. We always say we don’t make wedding videos for the couples, we make them for us, we make videos we want to watch over and over again, videos that remind us of these incredible people we were lucky enough to spend time with and just what made them so freaking cool!

This brings us to the big L, Love! What does love even mean?

Over the years we have seen so many different forms of love. It’s about challenging ourselves with each story to figure out what it is about these two people that makes it work. We love that challenge with each and every wedding video we take on. We often read it in their vows, or in their speech, but some times it’s not written in ink, sometimes we need to dig a little deeper and see how they interact on social media or what their friends say about them. When I think of that I think of what love is really all about, it’s not about the wedding, it’s not about standing up and telling everyone how much you love this person. It’s those kind of moments, the day to day moments that are shared by two best friends. So when we set out to tell your story on your wedding day we are always thinking of things like that, trying to move past the obvious and really make these stories unique.

Stories are why we do what we do and the privilege we have been given by our couples to tell their stories the way we want has been truly inspiring. That kind of creative freedom is hard to come by and it is something we are truly grateful for. Starting out making wedding videos has allowed us to grow as filmmakers.Being prepared, present and taking risks has really helped us grow as storytellers.

Looking back on these films really puts things into a perspective and gets us even more motivated for the new stories and adventures to come.